Decades ago, Velveeta had to be labeled “Pasteurized Prepared Cheese Product" so that customers could have truth in labeling. It was not "cheese", said the government.  The U.S. Federal Trade Commission even even told Kraft they could not even advertise that their "singles" contained five ounces of milk because of the implication the cheese might have as much calcium as 5 ounces of milk when it only had as much calcium as 3.5 ounces of milk.  Government was all about mandating consumer trust in labels then.

Ancient pigs went through a complete genomic turnover after they arrived in Europe, according to a new study. They were domesticated in the Near East and logically would genetically resemble the Near East wild boar from which they derived, but they do not.

Instead, they resemble European wild boar.

The work involved sequenced DNA signatures from more than 2,000 ancient pigs including genomes from 63 archaeological pigs collected across the Near East and Europe over the last 10,000 years.

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration is again warning consumers not to purchase, much less drink, a supplement drink sold as a medical treatment that goes by all kinds of interesting names, from Miracle or Master Mineral Solution, Miracle Mineral Supplement, MMS, Chlorine Dioxide (CD) Protocol, Water Purification Solution (WPS) and probably more.

Raw dairy is diarrhea and vomiting waiting to happen, there is a reason heat pasteurization is credited with saving a billion lives, but a company in Australia has used a legal loophole to milk raw believers into buying their un-pasteurized product.

Ever since telescopes were first invented, by some dutch lens grinder in the late XVIth century, and then demonstrated to be invaluable tools for investigating the cosmos around us by Galileo Galilei in the early 1600s, there has been a considerable, steady effort to construct bigger and better ones. Particularly bigger ones.

These "Living Planet Index" population figures are potentially confusing if you don't know how to read them and they have lead to many mistaken media stories.It does not mean that there are 88% less total numbers of large animals in our rivers and streams. We do not risk a world without salmon, hippos, beavers or crocodiles. Many outlets also ran it as a story about a greatly increased extinction risk for these animals. They did not even assess extinction risks and nothing in this report overrides the work of the IUCN red list.

This fossil specimen of the fruit of the lotus, Nelumbo, was found by Green River Stone (GRS) in early Eocene outcrops of the Fossil Lake Member of the Green River Formation. The awesome possums from GRS are based out of North Logan, Utah, USA and have unearthed some world-class specimens. They've found Nelumbo leaves over the years but this is their first fossil specimen of the fruit. 

On surveys, parents believe they are doing a great job helping teens be more independent, but today's kids are just too immature.

That last part is probably not true. It was overwhelmingly people in their mid-20s who won World War II and put man on the moon, we're the ones who've now decided that age is not mature enough to buy health insurance. If we want to do the dishes it is the nature of other human beings to let us do the dishes, because other people think that makes us happy. Believing that someone else will eventually want to do the dishes when they mature is wishful thinking.

I'll admit, I wanted to rather title this post "Billionaire Awards Prizes To Failed Theories", just for the sake of being flippant. But in any joke there is a little bit of truth, as I wish to discuss below.
The (not-so-anymore) news is that the "Special Breakthrough prize" in fundamental physics, instituted a decade ago by Russian philantropist Yuri Milner, and then co-funded by other filthy wealthy folks, recently went to three brillant theoretical physicists: Sergio Ferrara, Dan Freedman,  and Peter van Nieuwenzhuizen, who in the seventies developed an elegant quantum field theory, SuperGravity. 

Researchers have published the results of the largest prospective multicenter trial conducted of FDG-PET/CT in head and neck cancer, providing data on clinical decision-making.